A common situation that people find themselves in is searching for a particular service or product from businesses where the customer needs to be physically present in order to do the transaction. (For the purposes of this description, “retail location” will be used to describe all businesses where goods and services are obtained in person and “product” will include both physical products and services.)
A computer system which knows the stock of all the retailers near the customer could facilitate this, but providing a live feed of stock for thousands of small businesses to a central system presents many difficulties including the lack of existence of electronic stock systems for many of the businesses, and difficulties combining, understanding, and reaching agreement with many different stock and inventory systems for those that do.